Monday, January 28, 2008

Whilst it was day late (and I'm usually a dollar or ninety short), I celebrated my Aussie-ness by having lamb cooked on a barbie. If only we had have had vegemite sandwich snacks and pavlova or lamingtons for dessert :)

Why do you do with a PhD in Science?What is my life going to be?Five years of thinking, and plenty of drinkingHas earned me this useless degree.I don't have an answer,Cos we lost the grants. Uh.I should join the ARC mob.My thesis, impressive, my page count, excessive,Does not mean that I'll get a job.

Yup, the funding got reallocated, so my 'welcome back to the country' job doesn't exist. Am I surprised? Not really. Bring on the Hunt!

Thursday, January 10, 2008

I have a problem. Well, many of them... but I haven't got the time to list them here. The current thing bothering me is that after all that my underpants give to me, I don't have a suitably noble way to send them off. It's a rather poor lifestyle for them. They give so much to me. Then what? In the bin. Well I can't do it. My search for "underpants retirement ceremony" returned zero hits. As did "underpants cremation ceremony". Yes, with quotes included but I didn't do much better without them. So I need suggestions on how to honour the noble underpant and all it has done for me.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Bear with me on this one, it's a convoluted line of reasoning, but hopefully illuminating. Or at least the sort of thing we could argue about over a fire.

I was reading highlights of this article out to a colleague (loudly over the partition as there are only the two of us in this section of the office). It's a round up of recent strange applied biological research, including the fluoro cats and why kangaroos don't fart methane. The article goes on to describe ways that this batch of science could "save our lives". Apart from the inherent problem I have with blaming cattle for greenhouse gases, rather than examining our lifestyle choices, the entire article just struck me as a wonderful example of how extreme our reliance on technology and science has become.

It was the final section that clinched this concern. Studies on the way that mucus enhances our ability to interpret smells has lead to the development of a polymer to assist electronic noses to develop better perfumes and chips. As my colleague pointed out, we have people starving, and an environment being degraded and we are developing a better smelling chip??

Which led to a recap of a discussion I had with a friend on the weekend about Hinduism and Buddhism. His take on it is that these religions were developed in a society that used psychology as their chief explanation for how humans and the world worked, not natural science and physics as we do today. Hence these religions, particularly Buddhism seek a psychological solution to the problems of the world.

This led to a discussion on why we would have a society that thought randomly feeding medicines to worms was a good idea. Or a society that seems to feel a technical solution is the only one, rather than looking at what we value and what's important. The question was, as a bit of a throwaway line, is there actually intelligent life on this planet?

My response: "it's a bit like D&D you can have a high level of intelligence, but without the wisdom there's a problem". So, there you go, we should pay more attention to role playing games, so we can understand that wisdom is as important as intelligence and perhaps we'd stop researching ways of phosphorescing animals. Or at least focus on social solutions and not just technical methods for reducing cow farts.

&lt rant&gtFunny thing happened to us on the way to Japan... we got a little letter when we came back home to say that it's been fun but the landlord called and wants her house back.

So... we desperately needed to find a house during possibly the dumbest time of year. Even getting a removalist this time of year was annoying. Oh and the garden is way out of control with the tropical weather. Anyway... we moved. We had to move on or before the 5th of Jan. And we have. We played ball.

So what's the big deal? Turns out that the real estate agent isn't even open to take our keys back.

Spoke to Fair Trade who pretty much gave me two options:1. post the keys by secure mail2. put the keys in to their drop box if they have one, timed and dated on the envelope, keeping a personal record of the details. Should they not have a drop box we might have to wait till monday to hand over the keys.&lt/rant&gt